How do you find pages that cite a permalink?

When I posted Permalinks and hashtags for city council agenda items last week, I embedded a permalink and a hashtag to illustrate the idea. The post links to the video of Keene’s recent city council meeting, at the point where Patty Little introduces Tom LePage’s request to expand the Armadillo’s sidewalk cafe. The post also refers to this agenda item using the hashtag generated for it by the Granicus system.

I figured this would enable two ways to find pages, like my blog post, that refer to agenda items, like Tom’s request. First, you could search for pages that mention the hashtag. For example, this combined search of Google and Bing for granicus732_7716 finds my blog post because it mentions that tag. These searches also find my tweet containing the tag, and some echoes of the tweet. Finally, of course, you could search Twitter directly for the tag.

A second approach would be to search for pages that link to the video segment. I expected to be able to find my blog post by searching for this permalink which it cites:

I planned to use the link: operator, which finds pages pointing to an URL. And I figured this would work for both Google and Bing. But I was wrong on several counts. Bing doesn’t seem to support the link: operator. And even though Google does, this query doesn’t find my blog post.

Using the permalink as a plain search term doesn’t work either. And after reviewing the advanced search operators for both Google and Bing, I’m left wondering: How do you find pages that cite a permalink?

We might need to distinguish between indexing of pages that cite, versus pages that are cited.

The citing page in this case is a blog post of mine which is clearly indexed — it shows up in Google and Bing.

The cited page is clearly not indexed, and for this idea to work I hadn’t assumed that search engines would fully explore deep webs like the one Granicus is serving up. What I did assume is that when pages that were indexed cited those deep URLs, you could reliably find the citing pages on that basis.

But evidently not.

I guess I’ve never investigated this before, but it appears that while you can find my blog entry using this string of characters which appears in the text:

granicus732_7716

…you can’t find it using this string of characters which also appears in the text: